Winterstrike

by Liz Williams

  Peto was soon up, walking briskly about the deck as though she’d been awake for hours. She paid no attention to the encampment and I wondered whether she’d even noticed it; but the people of the Small Sea were known for paying little mind to other people’s business; one of their more endearing traits, as far as I was concerned.

  I’d have followed her example, if it had not been for an anomaly amongst the transient shelters: a series of slender spires, rising up in the middle of the encampment. Fragile banners in green and crimson and black fluttered in the early-morning wind. The spires were in the shape of cones, with a narrow, tapering top.

  ‘What are those things?’ I asked Peto, who shrugged.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘Do you mind if I take a look?’ I asked. It might mark me as someone not from the shores, so I added, ‘I’ve seen something like them before. Traders, from the far south.’

  That sparked a flicker of interest in the captain’s flat eyes. ‘As you wish. But don’t be long. I’m looking to set off in the hour. Don’t know what other traffic might be coming down. We’ll hit Sendar Locks before nightfall and if there’s a clog . . .’

  That’s fair,’ I said. I didn’t want to get held up any more than she did. ‘I won’t be long, I promise.’ While she busied herself with securing any cargo that had come loose on the way down, I stepped onto the bank and strolled through the tents to the spires, with the frost crunching underneath my feet. It was exhilarating just to be out of the city and into what passed for freedom, though I took careful note of my surroundings, in case any excissieres had come with the refugees.

  Those who had fled from Caud were varied, that was for sure. I passed a whole coven of acolytes, shivering around a meagre fire, a family with a flock of pinch-faced children, two little girls who seemed entirely on their own, a woman with a cage full of hens. As I drew near to the spires, they became even stranger: they looked as though the wood they were made of was moving, alive.

  I stopped and blinked. No, definitely moving. Intrigued, I walked closer and saw now that the spires were attached to a long carriage, made of metal and what looked like bone, but which was probably some plasto-substance. It had wheels, small and with thick black tyres, but also a glide barrier, quite a powerful one, suggesting that the carriage had the ability to rise into the air and fly for short distances.

  All of this meant money. There was a general air of opulence about the carriage, which had tinted windows set high on the sides – too high to look out, surely, and that usually meant that the occupants had camera access on the outside of the vehicle, to watch their surroundings from privacy within. I searched, and there it was, a shining obsidian eye set into the sinuous decoration that covered the sides of the carriage. I couldn’t tell what this carving was supposed to represent: it looked like a silver spine, the vertebrae coiling and curving about the sides and up over the roof. That took my gaze up to the towers again and I saw that the thin struts were not moving at all. Something was crawling up them – many things, pallid, slender bodies with thousands of legs. Centipedes. Each one of them was at least as long as my hands, placed fingertip to fingertip.

  The excissiere materialized behind me, so suddenly that I didn’t have time to pretend I’d been looking somewhere else.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I was interested.’ Tell the truth, why not? I forced my voice to normality. I pointed to the towers, bending under the weight of their unnatural occupants. ‘Those centipedes. Why are they here?’

  The excissiere said, with pride, ‘They have come with their Queen.’

  Their Queen?’ Now that I was looking at her more closely, I saw that she was not, in fact, an excissiere – not of the kind I knew, anyway. The scars were there, along her wrists and inside the high collar that she wore, but her uniform was the same cream as the bodies of the centipedes, and segmented. A close-fitting helmet confined her hair, spined along the top and back. She had no visible weapons except a trident-prong, wired up for electrical impact. But I could see cleverly concealed slits in the sleeves of her uniform, suggesting that she had weapons modification underneath.

  Now, the excissiere-guard nodded. ‘The Centipede Queen. She travels south, from Caud.’ Her face, all gaunt ridges of bone, contracted in an expression of distaste. ‘Caud. We were sent to it by your orbital authorities, not to Winterstrike as we wished and planned. They sought to show her as a freak, not a visiting dignitary as we were promised. We were glad to see it struck, gladder still to leave.’

  ‘Caud’s not the most hospitable place, true.’

  The guard squinted at me. ‘You’re from the south?’

  ‘From the shores of the Small Sea.’

  ‘Ah.’ The guard nodded again. A long way from Caud, then, and from our home, too.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘From Earth.’ Sound came from the carriage, a rustling, chittering noise, and the guard looked uneasily towards it.

  I was fascinated, but I knew when to make a sensible exit. Thank you for the information,’ I said. ‘I wish you safe travelling.’

  And you, also,’ the guard remarked. Her manners were better than an excissiere’s. And she hadn’t tried to kill me, either. At least, not yet. She headed off in the direction of the carriage, swinging the trident, and I walked thoughtfully back towards the barge. Interesting. If they’d come all the way from Earth, then no wonder I’d never heard of such a person as the Centipede Queen. I stepped onto the barge where the captain was impatiently waiting and we cast off without further ado. The refugee camp was waking up around us as the barge glided away, the air filling with steam from a thousand kettles, indistinguishable from the light morning mist.

  ‘If I had a year of life for every plea I’ve had to “take me with you”, I’d live to my third century,’ Peto said as we pulled away.

  ‘They’re desperate,’ I murmured.

  We did not speak of the matter any further, being occupied in taking the barge out into the stream amongst the heavier water traffic. There was a lot of it, now – huge industrial barges travelling down, an icebreaker with its double rams taking up centre place in the stream.

  As we headed south, the canal widened. I could still see the opposite bank, the high stone wall dimly visible through the layer of mist. Markers stood along it at intervals, ancient guard towers from when this was the main link between Caud and the Plains that it had once ruled. What must it have been like in those times, I wondered: when Martian origins had become a mystery and all contact with Earth had been severed? Times of great technological advance and great cruelty, times of stagnation followed by horrifying change. Times in which I should not like to have lived.

  Not that the current one was a whole lot better.

  It was at this point that Peto chose to share her travelling plans with me.

  ‘I’m not going to take the Grand Channel all the way down to the Small Sea. Too many locks and there was talk over the ’scribe – this morning when you were off. Talk of searches.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘Don’t know. Excissieres.’

  I had a sudden weird moment of guilt. They wouldn’t be looking for me – I’d finally managed to get through to Gennera and they knew exactly where I was, had grudgingly approved of my means of escape. They’d have sent someone to fetch me, so Gennera had said with what almost passed for apology, but they had their hands full at the moment and anyway, she didn’t think I’d want to attract attention.

  This was, I felt, the Winterstrike Matriarchy’s way of telling me that I’d done my job, very well done and all that, now get yourself home and if something happens to you along the way, well, at least we won’t be implicated. The work of a spy is, one might say, somewhat thankless at times.

  I turned my attention back to what the captain was telling me, which was that instead of heading down to the great locks – those miracles of invention that had made the Grand Channel a possibility – we would be taking a serie
s of smaller locks into the mountains. This would cut days off our journey and, though not without risk, was less likely to run us into trouble than sticking to the Grand Channel under present circumstances. After some thought, I agreed with her. The mountain route wasn’t unguarded and in this part of the hinterland was ruled neither by Caud nor Winterstrike, but by a small and separate matriarchy, very ancient, called the Noumenon, the Shadow Clans. Once upon a time, these had been rebels, from Caud I believed, but had been ejected from the city and sought refuge in the hills, battling off men-remnants to take control of a jagged range of hills, the High Galar, within the range called the Saghair. There had been a very popular public entertainment series about it when I was a child: we had not been allowed to watch, due to its sexual content, but did so anyway, in secret. Essegui and I had learned a lot, not all of it historical.

  ‘All right,’ I said to Peto. ‘Seems reasonable.’

  ‘Good, you agree. We take a cut-off just after the next locks. A good thing we left when we did – have you seen what’s coming down behind?’

  I took a look at the little radar screen. An enormous green blot was moving swiftly up the canal. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘Don’t know. Go and look.’

  I went onto the deck. It was clearly visible, even from this distance. It was some kind of dreadnought, bristling with cannon and a high observation turret, which to my mind made it look as though it was about to topple over. Glide rafts along its sides served as stabilizers and given the depth of the Channel – which I knew to be considerable but not that considerable – were also serving to keep the thing afloat.

  ‘That’s not from Caud,’ I said. The Caudi splatter their official craft with all manner of insignia to show everyone how important they are. Winterstrike is more restrained. But this thing had no symbols at all, no identifying marks, and that made me nervous.

  ‘Never seen that before,’ Peto said, coming to stand beside me on deck.

  ‘No idea where it’s from?’ It might be privately owned, and that was even more worrying.

  ‘No. But one thing’s for sure.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  We’d better get out of its way.’

  Peto took the tiller and I brought the radar console out on deck and started keying in coordinates. With a barge of this size, this was not strictly necessary in terms of steering, but Peto was careful about everything going into the log. I wanted to watch the dreadnought go by, so I sat with the console on my lap until Peto’s movements grew increasingly frantic. The dreadnought was bearing down on us at a rate of knots. We came perilously close to banging into another barge; there were shouts. I snatched the tiller from Peto’s hand, being younger, and hauled the barge round, feeling a hydraulic rush as the steering mechanism finally kicked in.

  ‘Not there!’ Peto yelled. ‘To the side! To the side!’

  I aimed the barge at a gap between a wallowing cargo carrier and what looked like a municipal ferry, crammed with passengers. It lurched from side to side and even if it didn’t capsize, I was afraid that it might crush us in the narrowing gap. I revved the barge up to its maximum power, which remained underwhelming, and we shot forward into the gap. Standing at the prow – the narrowest part of the barge – I could still have reached out an arm and touched the vessels that flanked us. The faces of the ferry passengers gaped like something out of a comic drawing; children, and some of their mothers, were screaming. At that point the sides of the barge scraped the ferry with a noise like old iron being banged with a hammer.

  ‘Careful!’ Peto cried, but from the way she was glancing from side to side, I could see that she was thinking the same thing as I. We were not going to make it through the gap. I looked over my shoulder and saw the great metal wall of the dreadnought rising up behind me. I could have stood in each of the cannon mouths with my arms upraised. Shouts were coming from the dreadnought itself – there seemed to be fighting taking place on deck – and just as I realized this, the dreadnought’s stabilizers roared further into life and the whole vessel rose upwards, wobbling. I was knocked backwards in the great draught of air, luckily onto the deck. The ferry wasn’t so fortunate. It swung, righted itself, then rolled over, spilling shrieking passengers into the canal.

  Peto leaped over me and seized the tiller. The barge was rocking to and fro, but I thought it was broad enough not to go over, even though enormous waves were washing diagonally across the canal. I scrambled to my feet and joined her at the helm; she was, as far as I could see, trying to avoid mowing down the overboard passengers. There was a great bubbling of air from underneath the capsized ferry: a moment later, its own stabilizers kicked in and it righted itself, carried up by a huge bladder, which subsided to let the ferry down onto the choppy water. Together with Peto, I grabbed hold of the swinging tiller and took the barge out into the middle of the stream, from which the dreadnought had so recently departed. Lifebelts were thrown and some passengers were already clambering back on board the ferry, but I’d seen at least three go under and not come up again. Had there been time, I’d have gone after them, but that would have meant the barge crashing into another vessel and probably costing more lives. I felt guilty and uneasy, all the same. Gradually, the churning surface of the canal returned to relative placidity and I looked up, to see the dreadnought flying south. It had extended a pair of vast wings on either side, which made it look like an unwieldy airborne beetle. People were hurling curses after it. I could not blame them. There was a pair of binoculars hanging on the cabin door: I slapped them to my eyes and saw that there was still movement across the dreadnought’s decks. A figure went over the side and fell sprawling through the air, running in nothingness.

  ‘Did you see that?’ I called to Peto. ‘Someone fell.’

  ‘Pirates,’ Peto spat. ‘All as bad as each other.’

  Perhaps she was right. I glanced around the canal and saw that the scrum of vessels was starting to resolve, with most people heading for open water and a degree of safe passage. I turned the binoculars on the horizon and saw that a line of mountain wall had appeared in the distance, with a low red sun hanging over it and casting it into indigo silhouette across the silvery expanse of the plain. From what Peto had told me, that meant we were not far from the locks and the cut-off: I’d be relieved to be clear of the main channel, if this sort of thing was going to happen. The dreadnought was now no bigger than a moth.

  ‘Check the cargo!’ Peto called, and I went down the stairs to the cabin at a run. But when I reached the bottom of the stairs, someone came out of the shadows in a rush and I was pinned against the wall with a razor at my throat.

  Interlude: Shorn

  When she looked back on her time in captivity, it seemed most of all like a dream. Faces moved in and out of sight, voices shivered the air. But when she thought about it, it wasn’t as though anything before that had been very real. Only the earliest years, laced into her stiff dresses, tottering like a little doll about the maze of the house – that was real enough. She remembered the way the light fell through the stained-glass windows of the rooms and cast a fractured pattern of colour across the floor, the frost on the windows of the winter garden on the roof of Calmaretto. She remembered the burn of lamplight on wineglasses as she crouched on the stairs, gazing down on her mothers’ dinner parties and glad, even then, that she was not old enough to be expected to join in.

  Thea hiding something in the cistern; the guilt on her face as she turned to see the little girl staring at her. Leretui hadn't understood until much later that the thing had been a bottle. And she wasn't sure that she really understood, even yet.

  Alleghetta storming about the house. The rage, when she’d been turned down for the council, time and time again. Alleghetta blaming Aunt Sulie, for spoiling her chances. Then success, rapidly soured by Leretui's disgrace. She would never forget the look on her mothers face, as realization dawned.

  It had been different for Essegui, although they were so close in age. Esseg
ui had always had that self-contained remoteness, the ability to shut everyone and everything out. Even when their mothers scolded her, which was often, Essegui would sit with a closed, still face and Leretui had the distinct impression that she simply wasn’t listening, although she could always repeat back what had been said if required to do so, with a faint air of wonder that verged, always, on contempt. Leretui had admired that, but she knew she’d never be able to emulate it even though she tried. And she did try: inventing whole countries, entire nations, inside the brittle cage of her own skull, conjuring alternative lives for herself, where she was not dull little Leretui, the quiet child, the scion of musty, dusty, Calmaretto, but an adventuress, a Matriarch, a warrior.

  The last thing she ever considered was that it might come true. But then the Voice had come, on a golden afternoon in summer, as she ran down towards the weedwood trees on the edge of the canal. The Voice was wild, proud, free as an animal’s voice, and it told her of many things, made many promises. She could be another person, if she chose. She could be anyone, if she only listened and waited.

  Leretui did both and dreamed of escape. She spent hours poring over the big atlas: the one that showed all the worlds in various stages of their development – Earth, before its floods; Mars, in the earliest days of its terraforming, as far as they could piece together the lands before the Lost Ages. She read about the haunt-ships, the great transliners that carried the passengers through into the realms of the dead and brought them back to life again, all the ancient, half-comprehended technologies bequeathed to the modern era from before the Age of Ice and the Age of Children, the Age of Error and the Age of Pain.

  And the Voice told Leretui things, too: how it was to live in the marshlands, in a burrow with one’s sisters. How it felt to give birth to a brood, teaching them to swim and hunt, but not too well, in case they turned on their mother, as often happened. How it felt to live under a different sky, the sun another colour, closer; and to run through the great ruined cities of one’s foremothers, ancestors very different to oneself, ancestors who could and must be blamed. The Voice whispered to Leretui about promises made and promises broken, on and on until her dreams were filled with the whispers and the Voice’s corrosive bitterness seeped into her heart like acid and left it etched and stained, so subtly that she barely realized the damage it had left in its wake.